Over the coming months, we'll focus on developing new features for the dotLottie (.lottie) format as well as revamping the existing players that will help unify their features and achieve parity across the different platforms.
For those new to the .lottie file format, you can check out dotlottie.io - a comprehensive resource for developers.
A new renderer - ThorVG
Moving forward we plan to base our new dotLottie players on the ThorVG vector graphics engine. Transitioning from lottie-web to ThorVG enables us to achieve feature parity for Lottie animations across web and mobile platforms, thanks to ThorVG's cross-platform capabilities.
With the same animation engine now powering all platforms, inconsistencies across platforms will be a thing of the past. This exciting update to the new dotLottie players addresses a major pain point in the Lottie ecosystem, ensuring feature consistency and reliability.
Theming
One key feature we're focusing on for the new dotLottie players is the ability to easily theme your Lottie animations at runtime. We also plan to bundle themes directly within the .lottie file so you can maintain a single source of truth for easier maintenance. Theming would remove the need for duplicating assets, manually changing animations or writing code to style them as dotLottie would manage loading the theme from its bundle.
State machines
We love interactive Lottie, so we’re looking to make this the best experience possible and we believe this is achievable with state machines. State machines will allow you to define simple or complex interactive scenarios, in a comprehensible manner and syntax. Our goals with this feature are:
- Allow users to eliminate the need for writing interactivity code – the dotLottie players handle the parsing of your defined state machine schema and loading.
- Allow users to define their own state machines in a simple and easy-to-understand manner. You can read the state machine and understand exactly what happens at every stage and why.
Multi-animation support
We’re also looking to implement supporting multiple animations inside a dotLottie file! Housing a page’s worth of animations inside a single .lottie will be possible, allowing you to reduce the number of files your page has to fetch but also having a single source of truth for your animations. When used in tandem with theming, all your animation contained inside will benefit from the theming configurations. When used with state-machines, you’ll be able to swap between animations based on user input.
Conclusion
With these new features we aim to make using, customizing and interacting with Lottie animations a lot more simpler. State machines will reduce the complexity of writing your own interactive code, possibly duplicating the effort for every platform you want to support. And theming will help re-use the same assets rather than duplicating them for every style you want to cover.
Our team is excited to bring these features to you and if you would like to participate in development or express your ideas for features you want to see within dotLottie, please do let us know via GitHub!
